Dance Dance Revolution

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DJ Konami wants you to get on the dance floor and bust it out... with your pinky fingers?

By IGN Staff

Dance Dance Revolution, like all the rest of the Bemani Konami games, is not scheduled for an American release any time in the near future. If you are interested in the game, check it out at a local or online importer.

If you're interested in seeing what others have thought about this game, check in with IGN's Pocket Boards.

There is no denying the phenomenon that is Konami's Dance Dance Revolution. From Japan to Hong Kong, Asian arcades are loaded up with the game that lets you bust out moves to pumping club beats, while your buddies look on and laugh. The arcade game is easily identified by its giant, stomp-able D-pad, and the player's only goal is to step on the up, down, left, and right buttons in time to the music. It's simple to learn, takes a lifetime to master, and has spawned countless clones and knock-offs.

So it's only natural for Konami to squeeze DDR into a Game Boy Color cartridge, isn't it? After all, the DJ simulator Beatmania made its way to both Game Boy and Wonderswan intact. Unfortunately, while Beatmania involves the player pressing keys on a miniature piano keyboard, DDR has always required you to move your feet and put your entire body into playing. So how's it translate on the tiny Game Boy?

Features

Arcade and Free Play modes

Linked-up "Party" mode

Eight levels of difficulty

Seventeen officially-licensed dance tracks

The Japanese version of Dance Dance Revolution ships in an oversized box, since it includes a plastic, four-button "dancing pad" that goes on top of the GBC. Two clamps lock on to the back of the unit, while leaving the start and select buttons accessible. The buttons on these feel a bit flimsy, and the left and right keys got stuck on occasion -- finer craftsmanship would have been appreciated.

Once you start the game, the game asks you if you want to use the dancing pad or not (friendly tip: don't even attempt the game without it), and gives you the gameplay selections of either Arcade Mode or Free Play. Before you start "dancing," you'll need to select a song -- there are a half-dozen available from the get-go, and their difficulty is ranked by the number of "feet" icons at the bottom of the screen.

After the music starts, you're free to rip up the dance floor... as far as your fingers are concerned, anyway. On the left-hand side of the screen, colored arrows slowly scroll upwards. When they hit the four arrows at the top of the screen, you have to press the corresponding key on the pad. There's an "groove bar" at the top of the screen, and if it falls into the red, the song ends abruptly and it's back to the rookies.

As you dance, the screen goes through all sorts of funky, psychadelic colors (that sometimes impair your vision of the colored arrows), and characters dance away in a window on the right. If you can find time to pull your eyes away from the hypnotic swarm of rising arrows, you'll see some bizarre, Konami-inspired weirdness going on behind the dancers -- the giant floating afro-heads with star-shaped sunglasses continue to plague my nightmares.

And then we have the music. The Dance Dance Revolution series has always prided itself on top-notch, licensed club mixes from Toshiba EMI and Intercord. And while the best songs from the game's second and third "mixes" are here, the Game Boy Color's audio processor is incapable of doing them justice. Konami's sound team could only do so much to make "I Believe in Miracles" and "Butterfly" vaguely dance-able. Sigh.

And that's the inherent problem -- Dance Dance Revolution was never intended to be played on a handheld in the first place. It's like trying to play Virtua Cop without the gun; the resulting experience is just a pale shadow of the arcade game. That's not to say that the game doesn't get tricky -- the "Another" and "Maniac" modes make you wonder how any human being could perform those kind of maneuvers with their feet, let alone their fingers.

The link cable mode works fine, and lets you hook up with a friend to dance to the same song simultaneously. Unfortunately, practice mode has been omitted, so you'll just have to keep slogging through the game to perfect the top-tier tunes.

Comments:

I wasn't expecting much when I heard that Dance Dance Revolution was coming out for the GBC -- after all, how can you scale down a full-sized dancing arcade cabinet onto a handheld? The answer in a nutshell: you can't. The arcade version is great because it provides an adrenaline rush and a physical workout -- you're not worried about what's happening on-screen, because you're too busy trying to keep in time and not look like a total buffoon.

Things aren't quite that exciting on the GBC version, since there's no physical "hook" -- aside from the cheesy dancing pad, that is. Even pounding through the game's toughest modes is little more than an exercise in rhythmic key entry, and it has no effect on the actual music or the on-screen dancers.

If you want the real Dance Dance Revolution experience, I suggest you head over to your local importer and pick up the Playstation or Dreamcast versions, and don't forget to buy the full-sized dancing pad. Whatever you do, stay away from this gimmicky exercise in carpal tunnel syndrome. It's a modest effort that just shouldn't have been attempted.